[Mark Hollis]

If I were doing subtitling, I would want an Avid DS, which has a wonderful subtitle generator in it that will use a text file to generate titles on the fly based on where you are in timecode. DS with an AJA card can also edit 24FPS. It can also produce a watermark or any other graphic element needed, as well as turn the image around.

But you’re looking cheap. My issue with “cheap” is that the subtitles will not be able to be regenerated come time to actually subtitle the real film for projection, presumably after the subtitles have been corrected and approved (which is probably the process you are involved with).

Danni, where are you? I can see if I can find a facility near you that can do the job and allow you to just concentrate on getting the subtitles correct (by editing a text file with timecode).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I am going to hazard a guess here that the movie is using the Apple ProRes codec, which you do not have for your PC.

You can download the https://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Windows ‘>Apple ProRes Decoder for Windows but I have a word of warning for you:

The Apple ProRes decoder for Windows may induce a small gamma shift when you import a ProRes Quicktime on your PC. It will play back correctly on a Mac and I think this is due to the gamma difference between Apple displays and PC displays.

Apple will be changing their default gamma in Snow Leopard, due out this fall. They may update the decoder for Windows or they may update the Windows Quicktime player when they release Quicktime X for the Mac (which is 64-bit) with Snow Leopard.

So try that codec with the caveat on gamma. If you can import without using broadcast-safe color filtering, you may be able to minimize the gamma shift slightly. It gets worse if you use broadcast-safe color filtering.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Vince has a really good point here — you are doing a software conversion. But one thing I believe you are doing is double-compressing the material.

If you have material that is in a compressed state (and that is what you are editing with) and you then use another codec to compress the final result, you’re double-compressing and video really hates that.

Vince’s point is that most facilities use a Teranex to do conversion. A VC300IC will run you around $40,000. And it’s worth every penny, because you can convert NTSC up to HD, using several methods of stretch or reverse-letterboxing, you can convert between HD standards (like from an American standard to an European one or between American standards) and so on. If you are a facility that does broadcast editing or you are a broadcaster, the cost of a Teranex is incidental to the cost of doing business.

All of your exports should be as simple as possible, and completely uncompressed. Then once you have uncompressed media on your computer, use a high-quality transcoder, like Sorensen Squeeze to reduce the bitrate down to something that is manageable.

And by manageable, that means the material can be played back using a normal computer off of a single hard drive (not an array).

I tend to use a tool from Steelbytes called HD_Speed to test drives. Arrays need to crank out significant speed 400 Mb/sec is a good speed for an array (with disks running at 10K RPM) but a solo (SATA) hard drive that you have in your computer may have a burst speed of 150Mb/sec. The problem with video is that, unless you have created a file that has no fragmentation, the video and audio information may require that your hard drive work hard to seek the next bit of the file while you are playing it. Most hard disks these days have RAM caches that allow the drive to read forward and store a bit of information so that the head actuator can get the next bit of video without dropping frames. This also keeps audio and video in sync as well.

The bit rate can be higher for hard drive playback than for DVD playback, as DVD drives run a lot slower than hard drives. The advantage with DVDs is that the information is stored in a manner that makes sequential access easy, because that is the way most DVD files are read, sequentially and not randomly.

A good bitrate for DVD burning is 7Mb/second. Blu-Ray is 30Mb/second. A hard drive can sustain those rates during playback with ease — even for a fragmented file.

So when you are setting up to output your final project, you need to be sure you compress once, and once only. Comnpress to a bitrate that may be played back easily by any computer — and that includes playback from a DVD or from a Blu-ray disk. Use the highest-quality settings to get the optimal bitrate you can with your material.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Your DVD player changes the screen resolution for your monitor when you play it full screen.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Another very important factor in render time is the amount of system RAM you devote to Premiere Pro.

CS3 and CS4 are not 64-bit applications, so they are limited as to how much RAM you can give them (actually all applications are limited but, with 64-bit the limitation goes way beond what is possible to put into today’s computers). About all Premiere Pro can possibly see is 3 or 3.5G of system RAM, but I’ll bet your system must have RAM installed in pairs, which means you’ll need 4G of RAM for your system if you are running Windows XP.

If you are in Vista, Vista will be able to allocate 4G of RAM per application, so you might consider installing 6 or 8G of RAM in your computer.

To get the exact specifications of RAM for your system, I prefer to use Crucial and their handy little application to examine your computer and to recommend RAM upgrades. I don’t always buy from Crucial, as they do not always have the least-expensive RAM. If you are purchasing RAM, you need to buy only from someone who offers a 100% no-questions-asked lifetime guarantee on their memory chips.

The single best speedup technique for any computer is to add RAM. The second best technique is to use faster drives. A fast drive array is also one of the most expensive upgrades you can make (other than buying a whole new system). So look to RAM first, faster drives second (and a striped SATA array is never a bad solution for high-speed storage).

If you are doing HD — no matter what compression, you should factor in the cost of a drive array for any venture that uses HD. You will always get better performance.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Can you talk me through this a little more?

I have created a rectangle (Graphic type).
For Fill, I have Solid
Inner stroke is set to Edge but that doesn’t seem to get my video in there.
Outer stroke, I’ve played around with that.
I have messed around with Opacity but there is no transparency setting in any of the strokes, fills and properties that I can see. Remember, I’m using 1.5 here.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Unfortunately, I don’t have the version that you are demonstrating there. I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5, which doesn’t let you do that in the titler.

Titler Fill types are Solid, Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient, 4-color Gradient, Bevel, Eliminate and Ghost.

None of those are video.

So if we upgrade, I’m looking forward to being able to do that.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You may need to reinstall codecs and you can install a whole lot of them with a reinstall of Windows Media 9:

Install the Windows Media Encoder 9 Series for added compression options with AVI reference and WMV file output. Windows Media 9 requires DirectX to be installed.

But some of those codecs certainly came with other tools, like your DVD burner and such. You may need to reinstall them as well.

Looks like some DLLs got overwritten or removed on your system. Did you just install something? Can you use Microsoft’s System Restore to get your system back to where it was before you did that installation?

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK, I did that and it did work, though it adds another video layer to the mix.

I kept playing around with some of the effects and found I could do the same thing with the “Clip” effect, which will allow me to fill left, top, right and bottom with a color. If I place the drop shadow beneath that effect, I get the effect that I want, which is a surround border on a picture-in-picture. A picture being a thousand words, please see the enclosed.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

We didn’t get CS3 and the choice to not upgrade was not made on my watch (I just started two weeks ago and am at the tail end of a number of command decisions that I simply need to accept). We can get P2 into the system by transcoding it — though I do not know what process is being used.

Going forward, we may move to FCP, though I’m agnostic — I am interested in a workflow that does not lose renders, handles the types of media we are using (Sony Betacam SX and Panasonic’s DVCPro, as well as P2) and gets us a completed program regularly once a week with a minimum of hysteria.

This last week was a good one: We had a “late-breaking” story that happened about 6 PM the day before we were due that necessitated the completion of one segment (mostly done all ready) and then we had to do show assembly. We try to be done by noon for review, but we were closer to 1:00 PM. Delivery by 5 PM — though that can be pushed.

We were completed by 2:30 and that was considered a really heavy, rushed schedule for output. Pardon me while I don’t break a sweat on that deadline. I used to have a nightly 6:30 PM deadline with tons of compositing.

We will stick with Premiere 1.5 until January, when we upgrade computers. There may be additional CS3 in the “may be purchased in shrinkwrap” pipeline somewhere, but we won’t buy anything new until we have new hardware. Included in our purchases is a new server and a fiber interconnect across the street. By far, the largest expense is the fiber because it involves backhoes, there not being conduit to pull it through.

Good to note about CS3, though I have a friend in Manchester, NH who says he had to upgrade to CS4 for P2 (maybe the JVC flavor he was using?). I didn’t upgrade to CS4 applications at home as I heard ample evidence that it was a “no go” for my system. And it was. I had a Mac G4-400 (Single-processor Sawtooth) with a processor upgrade (to 1GHz) and 1.5G of system RAM. CS4 does not run on G4.

Present home system outdistances the work system (Dell XPS600 Win XP-Pro with 4G of RAM). My home system is a 2.93GHz Dual Quad-core Intel Xeon Nehalem system with 8G of system RAM. It’s ready for CS4. It’s ready for Final Cut Pro. It’s ready for Snow Leopard.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?